A DRIVE DOWN CAPE
“Yes, I’ve been to Cape Cod. Drove all the way to Provincetown and back. There’s absolutely nothing to it, you know. Nothing but sand and scrub pine. How anyone could live there, or how anyone could choose to go there even for a visit is more than I can figure out!”
Every Cape Codder has probably been subjected to some such remark as the above from some “authority” who has taken all of a half day to rush down one side of the Cape and up the other, expecting who knows what miracles and side-shows, but seeing nothing anyway. It is a time to grit the teeth and be glad, at least, that they won’t be back. And yet you wish for a minute that you could show them, show them where the little lane they just passed so quickly led to a view that would be breath-taking in beauty and good for their souls, show them any of a thousand things that are waiting for those who would see. For where under the sun, if not on Cape Cod, could anyone find such infinite variety of landscape and seascape crowded into so small an area? Some of the new highways will be uninteresting, it is true, but so they are anywhere else for they are built for the age of speed when it is essential to go somewhere in a hurry and there is no time for looking around. But the new highways were designed by gentlemen with slide rules far away and they have nothing to do with the old roads that are still there to give pleasure.
There is, for example, a way of getting all the way down Cape to Truro and beyond and you need hardly touch any of the Main Roads in doing it. There is variety enough for anyone. You pass resort-type settlements, quiet ponds and hidden lakes, farmlands, beaches, vast panorama of two separate seas, flat plains and rolling dunes, salt meadow andfresh water brooks, dense pine woods and wind-swept clearings where the pine and the oak were gnarled and gaunt, but unbeaten. You can stop for a bit because there is no hurry and you can walk on a special stretch of beach along the Bay where there are no cottages and no people and the birds are many and varied. There the Bay smiles broadly all the way westward to where the protective arm of Wellfleet Harbor curves into the sea and northward to where the golden prow of Lieutenant’s Island cuts the water. Here is a beach to be combed, filled with all manner of treasure, a thousand romances of the sea at your feet. Here is air that is clean and fresh as it was in the beginning, swirling over a blue-green Bay, a white strand, and a salt marsh that is honey-colored in the sun and shot through with veins of brilliant blue by the high tide.
Leaving the beach to continue down Cape, you come suddenly upon the strangest scenery of all, where the moors of Wellfleet and Truro swell out of the Bay in fantastic shapes, and merely condescend to allow the old County Road to pass through them—which it does not do easily. The hills have been softly rounded by time and the wind, and they rise sometimes to great heights, only to fall off into sheltered valleys where the scrub pines grow. It is a crazy-quilt of topography and color, nearly smothered by a blanket of wild cranberry that is glossy-green in summer and scarlet in winter. The road is a roller-coaster, crossing and recrossing the railway, climbing tediously upwards and rushing suddenly downwards, winding snakelike, and almost repeating itself through the moors. And rounding each blind curve you come upon another sweeping view of the Bay, and of the flat hook of Provincetown in the distance. And always around you are the sand hills, like great ocean swells.
On some hills there are houses, so precariously perched that one expects to see them disappear like a ship into the trough of the waves. Sometimes the rains tear at the slopes and leave jagged scars; sometimes the blanket of wild cranberryis lifted to show the sand beneath, rose-colored in the sun. The telegraph poles along the highway stretch doggedly but insignificantly across the moors, black silhouettes that have adapted themselves to the surroundings until they look as if they might always have been there.
The moors have the look of old lands that might have been in at the writing of history. The encroachments of civilization upon them look temporary and out of place, and the sand hills have that about them which is eternal. These moors looked out upon the Mayflower in 1620 and felt the pioneer feet of Miles Standish and the other Pilgrims who set out from Provincetown to explore the Truro shore. At Corn Hill they discovered the Indian corn cache that was to mean so much to them in their struggle for survival. In these lands they found the strange grave of a white man indicating that not even Europeans were a novelty to these old hills. To the south, at Eastham, they had their first encounter with the Indians. It was this Bay shore that provided them with spring water, food, and the feel of land beneath feet that were weary from the motions of the ship. Looking for the familiar they found these dunes to be reminiscent of Holland, and they carefully gathered and took back to the ship any vegetation which looked like that of home. Then, with new courage, they turned their backs on home. They turned their backs on these moors that had given them succor. And then they sailed westward, into immortality.